Athos Therapeutics Announces the Completion of its Oversubscribed Series A Financing
LOS ANGELES, Nov. 15, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Athos Therapeutics, Inc., a late preclinical stage biotechnology company pioneering the development of first-in-class precision therapeutics for patients with autoimmune diseases and cancer, announced today the completion of an oversubscribed $15MM Series A financing.
The funding will be used to advance the company's pre-clinical and clinical programs, including the initiation of a first in human phase I clinical trial of ATH-63 in 2022. Athos is developing ATH-63 for Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Lupus, other autoimmune disorders, and select cancer indications. Funding will also be used to develop additional novel targets for autoimmune diseases and two first-in-class small molecule inhibitors for solid cancers and AML. Additionally, Athos will further advance its proprietary artificial intelligence drug discovery platform, and substantially expand its patient biomaterial omics database through collaborations with large academic medical centers all over the world, including the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.
"I am delighted at the progress Athos has made since our Seed round of $4.25MM in March of 2020. Those seed funds enabled us to hire a stellar team, develop a powerful drug discovery engine, perform multi-omics analysis of annotated patient samples from key IBD centers around the world, file 8 patents, and create a medicinal chemistry platform that produced 100's of highly selective and safe compounds with excellent pharmacologic profiles. The addition of more than $15MM in new funding will allow us to complete a Phase 1 human clinical trial with ATH-63 and progress our autoimmune and novel cancer programs towards the clinic," said Dimitrios Iliopoulos, PhD, MBA, President & Chief Executive Officer of Athos. "Furthermore, we are excited about the development of a new small molecule inhibitor that addresses the unmet needs of a subpopulation of AML patients," he added.
ATH-63 is a small molecule, first-in-class, approach to the massive unmet medical need of IBD. Medications currently prescribed for IBD are associated with limited efficacy, serious side effects, and were not developed for any specific IBD patient subtype. The development of ATH-63 was the result a meticulous systems biology approach where Athos was able to characterize IBD subtypes at the molecular level, using a proprietary biologic and network computational analysis of multi-omics data from highly annotated IBD patient samples.
"The field of IBD is in dire need of more precise, long-lasting, and far safer therapeutic options for millions of patients that suffer from the disease. In response to this need, we developed a highly targeted, precision medicine drug development platform to specifically identify compounds, like ATH-63, that we think will be game-changers for patients," said Allan J. Pantuck, MD, MS, Chairman and Chief Medical Officer of Athos. "Our entire team and Board want to extend our sincere thanks to our original seed funders, the many seed holders who also participated in the Series A, and our new Series A investors. We are honored to have all of you on Team Athos," he added.
About Athos Therapeutics
Athos Therapeutics Inc. is a late-stage preclinical biotech company developing small molecule therapeutics for immune-mediated diseases and cancer using artificial intelligence-generated innovative chemistry and computational platforms. The co-founders of Athos include one of the founders of Kite Pharma (acquired for $12B), the medicinal chemist behind two multi-billion-dollar FDA-approved drugs (Xtandi & Erleada), and the discoverer of the miR-124 drug target, currently in a Phase III IBD trial. Athos identifies novel drug targets (hubs) by integrating clinical and molecular datasets into the biological network of a disease (the disease interactome) and matches them to its small molecule computational chemistry platform. ATH-63, the Company's lead drug compound, is moving into a Phase Ia human clinical early in 2022. The Athos pipeline includes small molecule approaches for various autoimmune disease and cancer.
SOURCE Athos Therapeutics
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